Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear this week that, while the Senate is rapidly approaching recess, the Senate “will stay in [session] until a deal is struck to extend” the Patriot Act. McConnell has also introduced legislation for both long-term and short-term reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s expiring provisions. It seems that McConnell is trying to bully the entire Senate into passing short-term reauthorization, giving him more time to further weaken reform efforts.

Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure. That’s why EFF joined the nearly 150 privacy and human rights organizations, technology companies and trade associations, and individual security and policy experts who sent a letter urging President Obama to

The House Rules Committee isn’t interested in any amendments, privacy-protective or otherwise, to the NSA reform package.

After years of wrangling over bill text and amendments, the USA Freedom Act passed out of the Rules Committee with a lengthy hearing today. Next the bill will move to the House Floor for a vote in the next few days.

UPDATE (5/17/15): Last week, NSA defenders introduced a new bill to try to extend mass surveillance under the Patriot Act. We've created a new embeddable banner to stop this bill. Please insert this new code onto the homepage of your website after the <body> tag and before the </body> tag, to automatically display a banner that links to EFF's action opposing a temporary reauthorization of the Patriot Act:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit inACLU v. Clapper has determined that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court unequivocally rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215.